Nov. 13, 2008: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the firstvisible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star. Estimated tobe no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, calledFomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, or the"Southern Fish."snip---------------------------------------------

Julian alerted me to the BBC link on this discovery (see below) and Ihad skipped over the SpaceRef link in looking at their latest post.(also below).I had only looked at the Science @ NASA link here (above and below).

Nov. 13, 2008: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the firstvisible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star. Estimated tobe no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, calledFomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, or the"Southern Fish."

Fomalhaut has been a candidate for planet hunting ever since an excessof dust (a telltale sign of planet formation) was discovered aroundthe star in the early 1980s by NASA's Infrared Astronomy Satellite,IRAS.

In 2004, the coronagraph in the High Resolution Camera on Hubble'sAdvanced Camera for Surveys produced the first-ever resolvedvisible-light image of the region around Fomalhaut. (Note: Acoronagraph is a device that can block the bright light of a centralstar to reveal faint objects around it.) It clearly showed a ring ofprotoplanetary debris approximately 21.5 billion miles across andhaving a sharp inner edge.

This large debris disk is similar to the Kuiper Belt, which encirclesthe solar system and contains a range of icy bodies from dust grainsto objects the size of dwarf planets, such as Pluto.

Hubble astronomer Paul Kalas, of the University of California atBerkeley, and team members proposed in 2005 that the ring was beinggravitationally modified or "shepherded" by a planet lying between thestar and the ring's inner edge.

Now, Hubble has actually photographed a point source of light lying1.8 billion miles inside the ring's inner edge. The results are beingreported in the November 14 issue of Science magazine.

The first pictures of planets outside our Solar System have beentaken, two groups report in the journal Science.

Visible and infrared images have been snapped of a planet orbiting astar 25 light-years away.

The planet is believed to be the coolest, lowest-mass object ever seenoutside our own solar neighbourhood.

In a separate study, an exoplanetary system, comprising three planets,has been directly imaged, circling a star in the constellationPegasus.

While several claims have been made to such direct detection before,they have later been proven wrong or await confirmation.

The search for exoplanets has up to now depended on detecting eitherthe wobble they induce in their parent star or, if their orbits areside-on to telescopes, watching them dim the star's light as they passin front of it.

Being able to directly detect the light from these planets will allowastronomers to study their composition and atmospheres in detail.

After eight years and repeated photographs of a nearby star in hopesof finding planets, University of California, Berkeley, astronomerPaul Kalas finally has his prize: the first visible-light snapshots ofa planet outside our solar system.